Best Monster Hunter World Players Explain How They Trained for the USA Championships

The Switch Axe dominated, but not because it's the best weapon ever.

By Casey Defreitas

For the first time ever, Capcom held an official, standalone Monster Hunter tournament stateside on July 28, 2018 in San Francisco. At stake was a trip to Japan to represent the US in a worldwide championship, and when the dust settled Social Dissonance walked away with the honor. But the journey was as much a part of the story as the destination, and we talked to some of the USA Championship finalists about why a certain weapon was so popular, how they prepared, and how other players can get better at this notoriously challenging game. Watch the video for a summary of three finalist's tales, or read on for an in-depth look.

How a Monster Hunter Tournament Works

For a game like Monster Hunter, in which there is no direct PvP combat, a tournament involves teams of two competing to take down monsters as quickly as possible in a time-attack-style mode called an Arena Quest. These quests offer only five weapons to choose from out of fourteen, with specified loadouts of armor and items for each choice.

The qualifier Arena Quest featured the Pukei-Pukei, a poison-spewing bird wyvern. Only the top eight of the dozens of teams who entered moved on to the finals, where they faced the much more challenging elder dragon, Nergigante.

The time trial requires a very different approach to playing Monster Hunter World than the usual quests in sprawling maps. "It’s a lot faster in terms of you’re just jumping in,” says Andre Santiago, known as Omnitoad on Twitch, of Team Tanzia Chips n Salsa. “There’s no prep, or getting your items, or mining stuff, it's just fighting and hoping you get a good time, building strategy on the quest that's available."

"I would say that this is definitely a more meta-based version of playing the game, so I wouldn’t really say it’s like a speed run, as much as, you’re testing your own ability within certain requirements," said BrotherVirtue_, also of Team Tanzia Chips n Salsa.

Michael Crutchfield, better known as Shephard from the YouTube channel Social Dissonance, says he treats Arena Quests almost like puzzles. "It’s very interesting,” he says. “From those five loadouts, you and your partner have to decide which two combinations of weapons are going to work best with whatever strategy we want to do.” He continues, "When you’re playing the main game, the choices are limitless. You can make any weapon combination and any armor set, and you can really make almost anything work against any monster.”

How Long Have the Finalists Played Monster Hunter?

Each of the four competitors I interviewed have been playing Monster Hunter since either the very first game on the PlayStation 2 in 2004, or Monster Hunter Freedom in 2006 or Freedom Unite in 2008, both for the PSP. They’ve put in hundreds -- or, in some cases, thousands -- of hours into the series. Shephard estimated he’s played about 1,000 hours for each entry, so around 8,000 to 9,000 hours total; and BrotherVirtue_ said he’s probably put in about a total of 60,000 hours -- an exaggeration, I’m sure -- with about 400 in World so far.

The timed Arena Quest battle the finalists faced was the Nergigante Slay Event 4, which provided loadouts for Sword & Shield, Dual Blades, Lance, Switch Axe, and Light Bowgun and was available to play in Monster Hunter World before the tournament. So, of course, the teams prepared -- as much as they could, at least. Capcom announced the tournament just a month before the competition date.

Shephard practiced that specific Nergigante quest for two to three hours a day with his teammate, Sam, while also continuing his daily four-to-five hour stream. He estimates they tackled the Arena Quest, which takes around five minutes to complete, 300 times in preparation. Team Royals and Tanzia Chips n Salsa say they put a similar amount of time into training for the event.

Why the Switch Axe Dominated the Championship

Tanzia Chips n Salsa tried out three different combinations before settling on dual Switch Axes, the same loadout four of the other teams in the top eight used in the finals, including Social Dissonance. Two of the remaining teams, including Team Royals, went with dual Lances, and the only true outlier was Ultimate Uragaan, who used one Switch Axe and one Lance.

These limited choices don’t speak to what’s most popular in Monster Hunter World overall, only what loadout the community as a whole had determined to be the best choice for this particular quest.

“What we saw today were a lot of very good Switch Axes. Doesn’t mean that they were the best weapons for the best teams here, it’s just the one that we decided on,” Shephard explained. “There are other weapons that could work -- certainly the Sword and Shield has one of the best times -- but in a tournament setting you have to think about what’s going to be the most reliable. So even though the Sword and Shield can be very good, it’s going to really matter that Nergigante cooperates. With Switch Axe, you can really force the flow of the fight and do a lot of damage. Of course, you want the one month you have to train to be the most consistent with the most reliable weapon. So that’s what you saw a lot of.”

In a tournament setting you have to think about what's going to be the most reliable.

BrotherVirtue_ had a similar take on the Switch Axe.“[The Switch Axe is] a weapon that you can get a better time with,” BrotherVirtue_ began, but paused, adding, “That’s not true. It’s a less challenging weapon than the Sword and Shield.”

“The Switch Axe is kind of a joke in my community,” Shephard said, referencing Social Dissonance, his YouTube and Discord community and the team’s namesake. “But honestly, Monster Hunter World has really made it very interesting. You have to constantly be transforming. In fact, some of the transformation attacks make it one of the most powerful. It requires a lot of thought and a lot of practice to get good with.”

Omnitoad, among others, trained with the Switch Axe specifically for the USA Championship. “I don’t use Switch Axe. That’s not one of my main weapons for this game, but I learned it for this quest,” Omnitoad said. “Mostly what I use is Hunting Horn, Gunlance, Great Sword…”

Omnitoad trained with the Switch Axe for about 20 hours in preparation. That’s not a negligible amount of time, but to put it in perspective it’s only five percent of the total time he’s spent in Monster Hunter World -- about 400 hours to date.

After all of that effort, Omnitoad and his partner BrotherVirtue_ of Tanzia Chips n Salsa finished in third place.

“I felt I did pretty well,” Omnitoad said. “I put on a good show, the crowd got pretty hyped.”

Though it’s common to see an oversaturation of certain weapon combos in Monster Hunter’s Arena Quest leaderboards, as further evidenced by the Switch Axe preference at the USA Championship, there isn’t always an end-all, be-all, best weapon for a quest.

“If you watch the recent Japanese tournament, three of the top four teams use Sword and Shield and Bow, and they all had very good times. But the one team that actually had the best time were two people who used the Lance,” Shephard said. “And they used their knowledge of the weapon and the item set that came with it to come up with a strategy that nobody else had thought of.”

Lady Amatsu and her teammate knew their friends, Social Dissonance and other teams who attended the USA Championship as a community, were all using Switch Axe. However, they both chose to use the Lance as their main weapon of choice in Monster Hunter World.

“We would reference each other, try to incorporate strategies that they were using with the Switch Axe, but tailor it to us,” Lady Amatsu said. “[The Lance] is what we’re most comfortable with.”

Lady Amatsu and her team finished in fifth place with a time of 4:14.51, their personal best. And for her, this performance held a special meaning on top of that achievement.

I want all of the girl players to not be afraid. You can be just as great as a hunter as everyone else.

“You know, the most obvious thing is I was the only girl up there. I want all of the girl players to not be afraid. You can be just as great as a hunter as everyone else. And I hope that I could inspire other girls, other females, other people that identify that way, to play Monster Hunter, and put themselves out there,” she says.

Shephard adds that if there had been more quests besides the Nergigante quest in rotation, there would have been a lot more diversity of weapons used. And that only makes sense. Every monster in Monster Hunter is unique, and each requires a different approach to take it down as quickly and efficiently as possible. You want to use the right tool for the job.

Advice from the Finalists

Seeing how dedicated the USA Championship finalists are to Monster Hunter can be intimidating to those of us who consider ourselves dedicated players but can’t invest that amount of time. But there’s hope for the less experienced out there to stand on their shoulders and improve our skills.

“Say you like Hunting Horn: look for Hunting Horn speedruns,” advises Shephard. “There are people all around the world that practice this one weapon against this one monster exclusively, and it doesn’t mean that’s how you have to play it, but it’s always going to give you a very good baseline on how you want to approach that weapon.”

...anybody that trains hard enough can be really really good at this game.

“If you want to get better, there are resources out there for you to do that,” BrotherVirtue_ said.

Online resources exist to help any prospective hunter, ranging from dedicated communities like Adopt-a-Hunter, which pairs new players with veterans, to more casual Discord channels and expansive wikis with countless how-to articles. But once the ins and outs are learned, nothing beats practice.

“So my teammate is Sam, he’s been a longtime supporter of the [YouTube] channel [Social Dissonance], and also I think … kind of proof that anybody that trains hard enough can be really really good at this game,” Shephard says. “Sam was somebody from a couple months ago that would commonly cart, but after a month of training we are actually competing, I believe, at the world level.”

Shephard and his teammate Sam won the entire USA Championship with a time of 3:03.80, so it’s safe to say they played at the top level at the event. You can see what they won for their efforts, including a special Monster Hunter Memorigins Tourbillon watch, in the video below.

“They have time attack records on YouTube, the best time I’ve seen, it’s like crazy, it’s around two-twenty-ish,” Omnitoad said. “But that’s many tries in a row of people just constantly resetting, resetting, resetting, so at a tournament you have to do what you got to do.”

“Today’s event was amazing, I can say, for all the Monster Hunter fans in the west,” Shephard said. “Seeing this sort of event put on by Capcom, really putting us on the same sort of degree and level as other championships worldwide, of course it’s a great honor to be able to participate in.”

Casey DeFreitas is an Editor at IGN and had a great time at the Monster Hunter World USA Championship. Catch her crying happy tears over defeating the Behemoth as a Wiggler on Twitter @ShinyCaseyD.